REST: A parallelized system for reliability estimation

The authors describe a software tool called REST (Reliability Estimation System Testbed) that provides increased power of expression and computation. REST is innovative in its use of an object-oriented language to describe systems, in its avoidance of a memory bottleneck during the analysis, and in its automatic exploitation of parallelism both on a commercial multiprocessor and on a network of ordinary workstations. The potential of the Failure Mode Effects Simulation paradigm on which REST is based is shown by rapid analysis on a parallel computer of a complex reconfigurable system